U r s u l a S c h n e i d e r

earth, air, water

curated by John J. McGurk

March 25 - April 26, 2013

Mikhail Zakin Gallery, Demarest, NJ

Exhibition:Ursula Schneiderearth, air, water

March 25 - April 26, 2013

Mikhail Zakin Gallery@ The Art School at Old Church

561 Piermont RoadDemarest, NJ 07627

Catalog Design:John J. McGurkGallery Director

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Mikhail Zakin Gallery© 2013

www.tasoc.org

This program is made possible in part by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endow-ment for the Arts.

Curatorial Statement:

When putting together an exhibition, there is always a long list of people that need to be thanked for all their hard work. For this exhibition I would like to go back to a time before it was even an idea. In the Fall of 2011, the late founder of the Art School and the gallery’s namesake, Mikhail Zakin, spoke with me briefly about meeting an artist whose work would be an attractive fit for the gallery. It was this initial conversation that got the proverbial ball rolling. Thank you to Mikhail for making the connection and introducing me to the vibrant and exciting work of Ursula Schnei-der.

One rainy, wintery day, a few of my colleagues and I from the Art School visited Schneider’s studio, located up the Hudson River in a quintessential rustic old mill building. It was the perfect setting to view Ursula’s work, an artist that takes the wild and vast landscapes found in nature and concentrates them into nylon canvases, a technique and style of her own invention.

During her treks and explorations of Alaska and Iceland, Schnei-der sketches and takes photos which later are used in the studio to create her paintings and inspire her woodblock prints. I have enjoyed meeting with Ursula on multiple occasions, discussing and finally choosing the works that are included in this exhibi-tion. Her vision and respect for the natural world are inspiring and vividly evident in her work. It is my hope that the viewers of the exhibition will leave with a new perspective on our natural world and the beauty it holds.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Maria Danziger, Executive Director at the Art School for her continued support and encouragement of my programming and curatorial choices for the gallery. All of which would be impossible without the as-sistance of Gallery Manager Mary Gagler and jack of all trades Peter Schmidt, the Operations Director for the school and gallery.

John J. McGurkDirector & CuratorMikhail Zakin Gallery

Ursula Schneider

Ursula Schneider: earth, air, water

Essay by Susan Kart

So often in the history of art, we are taught about nature. The fact that nature has always been a fundamental aspect of art from around the globe and throughout time is a staggering reminder of how inextricable human life and creativity are from the natural world. So ubiquitous is the relationship be-tween art and nature that as viewers, we search for natural references in works of art, even when there seem to be none at stake. How many of us have looked at a color field “multiform” painting by Mark Rothko, determined to see a sunset within the bands of vibrating color?

Of greater concern is that modern and contemporary artists are often judged by their ability to imitate natural forms. Many a would-be academic painter found himself excluded from the prestigious 1863 Salon de Paris for non-conformity to the painterly dictates that prioritized naturalism. Visible brushwork, the absence of under-drawing, and applications of secondary next to pri-mary colors, produced oscillations that seemed to disregard the natural world. The refused painters protested: their works were in closer dialogue with nature precisely because of their focus on painting outdoors, in natural light, subject to the whims of sun, cloud and mist. These ‘Impressions’ of the natural world were more honest, they argued, for they more directly responded to

how humans perceive the natural world – in glimpses, in after-noons, in moments of sunset or fog, moments that were fleeting, small, and humble compared to the awesome expanse of earth, sky and water that could never be fully captured by the human eye, nevermind by paint or stone.

Given the millennia of artworks produced in dialogue with na-ture, the mere fact that contemporary artists are still choosing to respond to the natural spaces of our planet is at once remark-able and yet unsurprising. Landforms (2001) resulted from Ursula Schneider’s trip to Australia. Pastel drawings of mountain ranges done on location became her documentary evidence of place and time. Sands, collected from the landscape, were converted

into pigments that cover the majority of the enormous surface of the paint-ing. The Australian mountainscape and the work of art are thus fused, indelibly mapped onto each other. The result is a disorienting alternative space where human perception of land, sky and shadow collide with the

tangible earth itself. Suddenly our vision and our experience are one and the same. But, this was not brought about by painterly artifice, linear perspective, poignant sfumato, or photographic realism. Rather it is the unexpected abstraction resulting from the actual earth (sand) serving as a sign for itself (in a work of art) that collapses our experience into two dimensions from the at-tended three.

Place, therefore, is a foundational element in all of Schneider’s recent works. The actual location of the artist in a specific terroir determines the metaphors and final visual readings of works of art in disparate media. Water soluble oil pastel sketches done on site at the Canning River and Sadlerochit Mountains in Alaska, or overlooking the Hudson River in New York become the raw materials for Schneider back in her studio. Her works are the result

of research and time consuming studio processes of woodblock carving, printing, creating her own specialized canvases from transparent nylon fabric and sometimes, her own pigments as seen in Landforms.

Schneider’s finished works are produced as either Hanga wood-cuts on Japanese paper or paintings of water dispersed color pigments mixed with urethane applied onto layers of laminated nylon. Both techniques allow the artist to achieve spatial depth on the surface of the work. Layers of color in the woodcuts or layers of sheer nylon in the paintings create microenvironments of color, movement and depth. These in turn become metaphors for the grand panoramas captured from her original vantage points while sketching the landscapes.

Furthermore, Schneider’s choice of materials reflects a certain ethereal or fragile quality – present in the land-scape and captured via technique in the studio. The Hanga woodcut pro-cess allows for multiple carved blocks to be painted and pressed onto paper. Semitransparent papers and a narrow color palette create deliberate serenity, balancing Schneider’s ethereal abstraction of mountains, rivers and stones into delicate, fluid patterns. The urethane pigments swept onto nylon ‘canvases’ bleed gently into each other, at once emu-lating watercolor techniques, but also simultaneously creating highly effective reflections. Water reverberates lights from houses along the Hudson riverfront, or fireworks in the night sky seen from Peekskill, in a manner that is at times as realistic as it is artificial in construction.

These are landscapes neither as we perceive them in nature, nor as they actually exist, but rather dissections of nature into its elemental forms: earth, air, and water. There is no vegetation in a Schneider landscape, no human presence. Rather we are

presented with solids: landmasses converted into swaths of color, reflection and shadow. The artist uses terms like “uplift” “erosion” and “airiness” when describing her prints and paintings from the last decade; indications that the elements of nature, not its flora or fauna, are in fact the intentional focus of the artworks. By strip-ping the landscape down to its mineral base, Schneider is able to interrogate more deeply the passion that humans have for our lived environments, our amazement at the size, scope and awesomeness of nature. And yet, Schneider makes apparent our inability to fully grasp, see or experience the world around us. Our limited capacities of perception are revealed in her artworks, where the Sublime dominates her canvases.

Schneider’s impressions, like those of the avant-garde painters before her, reflect on her own experiential rela-tionships with specific places. In refus-ing to submit to the tropes of painting that bind an artist to naturalistic rendi-tions, Schneider highlights the honesty of the painterly process: that vantage

points are choices, that vision is subjective, that the land is larger than we can imagine, that color planes can be dimensional and that paintings are long horizontal swaths of fabric that can be rolled, hung or stretched. The possibilities are endless.

Susan Kart is Professor of African Art at Sarah Lawrence and Curator at the Art Gallery at Yonkers Riverfront Library.

Fireworks II, pigments and urethane on laminated nylon, 45 x 92”, 2010

Fireworks Hudson River, pigments and urethane on laminated nylon, 45 x 92”, 2010

Milkyway- Coralbay, pigments and urethane on laminated nylon, 28 x 84”, 2002

August Hudson River, pigments and urethane on laminated nylon, 45 x 92”, 2009

Bear In Mind, pigments and urethane on laminated nylon, 13 x 92”, 2003

Bear In Mind, detail

Landforms 3, sand, pigments and urethane on laminated nylon, 14 x 91”, 2001

Landforms 3, detail

Chaning River, Hanga woodcut on handmade paper, 13 x 38”, 1996Edition of 30

Refuge, Hanga woodcut on handmade paper, 12 x 39”, 1999Edition of 30

Sadlerochit Mountains, Hanga woodcut on handmade paper, 5 x 26”, 1995Edition of 30

Icelandscape, Hanga woodcut on Stonehenge paper, 5 x 22”, 1993Edition of 50

Kongakut River, Hanga woodcut on handmade paper, 6 x 25”, 1995Edition of 30

Etivlukpigments and urethaneon laminated nylon 111 x 13” 2003

Etivluk, detail I

Etivluk, detail II

Bear in Mind, Hanga woodcut on handmade paper, 14 x 17”, 2004Edition of 30

Bear It, Hanga woodcut on handmade paper, 14 x 17”, 2004Edition of 30

Song, Hanga woodcut on handmade paper, 27 x 27”, 2006Edition of 10

Low Tide, Hanga woodcut on Torinoko paper, 25 x 25”, 2013Edition of 30

Beetle (Stink Bugs), Hanga woodcut on handmade paper, 26 x 26”, 2012Edition of 15

Three Horses, Hanga woodcut on Stonehenge paper, 10 x 22”, 1993Edition of 50

URSULA SCHNEIDER CVlives + works in Tompkins Cove, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS Selected 2012 Gallery 1025, Paducah, KY Marina Gallery, Cold Spring, NY QUER, Kunstraum, Switzerland2010 Gallery 1025, Paducah, KY2009 Braunstein Gallery, San Fran,CA2008 A.I.R Gallery, New York, NY2007 Pomona Cultural Center, NY2006 RoCA Gallery One, Rockland Center for the Arts, NY2005 A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY2003 Braunstein Gallery, San Fran cisco, CA2002 A.I.R Gallery, New York, N.Y.1998 Braunstein Gallery, San Fran cisco, CA1995 Braunstein Gallery, San Fran cisco, CA1993 Forum Vebicus, Schaffhausen, Switzerland1989 Atelier Rabiusla, Herrliberg, Switzerland1982 Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland1979 California State University, Los Angeles, CA1978 UC Art Museum, Matrix Gallery, Berkley, CA

GROUP EXHIBITIONS Selected2012 The Printed Image, The Belskie Museum, Closter, NJ 2009 Between the Lines, Garnerville Gallery, Garnerville, NY2008 Scene Change, A.I.R Gallery, New York2007 one true thing, A.I.R Gallery, New York2005 Black & White, Edward Hop- per Art Center, Nyack, NY2004 Mixed Company, A.I.R Gallery, New York, NY1998 Matrix/Berkley: 20 Years, Berk- ley Museum, Berkeley, CA1997 Moku Hanga Exhibition: Con temporary. Japanese Woodcuts1989 Through the Land, Mary Dela- hoid Gallery, New York, NY1984 Modern Masks, Whitney Muse- um of American Art, NY, NY1980 Sculpture in California, San Diego Museum of Art, CA1979 Installations, LA Institute of Contemporary Art, L.A., CA1975 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY Exchange: DFW/SFO, Museum of Fine Arts, Fort Worth, TX1974 Braunstein Gallery, San Fran, CA

EDUCATION1959- 61 Kunstgewerbe Schule Zu rich, Switzerland1961-67 BFA in Sculpture and Ce ramics, Keramische Fach schule, Bern, Switzerland1968-72 MFA in Painting, San Fran cisco Art Institute, SF

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 1983 San Francisco Art Institute, Painting and Drawing Faculty1980-85 Cooper Union, New York City, Adjunct Painting and Drawing Faculty1986-present Sarah Lawrence Coll ege, Bronxville, NY, Tenured Painting Faculty

GRANTS AND AWARDS1985 National Endowment for the Arts. Major Fellowship Grant1974 The Oakland Museum. The New Talent Award1968 Swiss Government Grant: Kunststipendium